


Just Another Saturday Night in Port Krin

by Mal-3 (The_Fenspace_Collective)



Series: Candle In The Dark: A Peculiar Saga of the Sea of Time [13]
Category: BattleTech: MechWarrior, Fenspace
Genre: Gen, Trigger Warning: Claptrap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-28
Updated: 2015-08-28
Packaged: 2018-04-17 18:28:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4676876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Fenspace_Collective/pseuds/Mal-3
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As life returns to what passes for normal in the Fen-controlled city of Port Krin, intrepid Wolfnet agent Remus Lupin wanders out to get a drink, annoying robots and mysterious mechwarriors be damned.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Just Another Saturday Night in Port Krin

**Port Krin, Antallos**  
**19 April 3023**

“We’re pretty easygoing folk,” one Fen had said to Remus Lupin when he first arrived, “but when we feel like moving, we _move_.” Several months into his stay at Port Krin, the mechanic-turned-tourist-turned-intelligence agent couldn’t help but agree with the statement. When he first got off the dropship, Port Krin had been a massive, sprawling slum surrounding a cluster of whitewashed buildings that marked the original Terran Hegemony settlement. Today most of the city was still in a poor way--the scars of hundreds of years of poverty, conflict and indifferent administration weren’t going to vanish overnight--but even from his apartment just outside the Fen quarter Remus could see marked signs of improvement. Multicolored tenement blocks rose where the worst of the squats and slums were being torn down and replaced with solid housing units made out of the ubiquitous shipping containers that collected at every spaceport in the galaxy. Remus’s own apartment was one of these, and while a bit spartan it was comfortable enough. New trees made of ceramics and metal sprouted in the city, a forest of communications relays and simple solar power generators that, combined with the tablets the Fen distributed like candy, meant that the entire city of Port Krin was connected to power, clean water and phone networks for the first time since before the Fall.

Remus noted all of this carefully in his letters home, letting his “family” know all about the changes the Fen were bringing to Antallos and how amazing the whole thing was. And it _was_ fairly amazing: by Remus’s lights the new overlords of Port Krin should’ve left the majority of the city to fend for itself while playing house in the old palaces. That they seemed interested in at least _trying_ to better the life of the peasants and refugees was… strange. Strange and a little unsettling.

But that was for the next report, or the next. On Saturday night, Remus had decided to indulge in a few vices at the Mended Drum, a favorite bar in the Fen sector and not at all coincidentally one of the places XCOM regulars liked to hang out. As far as Remus was concerned, the combination of beer and passive intelligence gathering couldn’t be beat.

Whistling contentedly, he pulled on his coat and hit the street.

~***~

The evening got off to a fine start, when Remus was shouted down on his way to the Mended Drum.

“ _Halt right there, evildoer!_ ” Remus turned and saw a battered yellow robot (or possibly mobile trash bin, he wasn’t entirely sure) trundle up to him on one wheel, spindly arms waving in the air. “Your papers please, comrade citizen!”

Remus frowned, and the robot shrank back. “And _you_ are?” he asked in his best Colonel Wolf impression. The robot rolled backwards another foot, then seemed to straighten up a little.

“Ha ha ha! Just a joke! Really! Part of the authentic Port Krin welcome!” The robot’s voice seemed perfectly-pitched for Olympic-scale babbling. “Welcome to Spheric Alley! I am CL4P-TRP, personal service and security robot for the Port Krin Community Center, but you can call me Claptrap!” It stuck out a manipulator. Remus looked at it blankly, then back at Claptrap, until the robot finally put its arm down. “Oh. Well, maybe that’s a custom you Inner Sphere people don’t have? See, back on Mars we like to shake hands, like this!” The robot grabbed one hand in another and began to wobble vigorously up and down. “See? Just like that! It’s one of the many quaint customs you’ll find in historic Spheric Alley! Like dubstep! Wubwubwubwubwubwubwub--”

By this point a small crowd had gathered and Remus could feel the beginnings of a migrane. “Hey,” he said. Claptrap seemed perfectly content to ignore him, happily wubbing to himself and bobbing around in a futile attempt to dance. Remus sighed. “HEY!” he barked, snapping Claptrap out of his reverie. “I know what the Alley is,” he said. “I live just two streets over from here. I don’t need… whatever the hell this is supposed to be.”

“Oh!” Claptrap exclaimed cheerily. “A neighbor! Howdy, neighbor, I’m Claptrap!”

“Remus Lupin.”

“Lupin, Lupin. I know that name. LUpin? LuPIN? Hmm…” Claptrap replied, putting manipulator to camera. “That rings a bell, why does that ring a bell?”

“I’m a mechanic over at Honest Ackbar’s,” Remus offered, only to have Claptrap wave him off.

“No, that’s not it… ReMUS LuPIN, wait, I’ve got it!” Claptrap paused, then shrieked. “YOU’RE A WEREWOLF!”

“What?”

“DON’T KILL ME! I’M TOO YOUNG AND PRETTY TO DIE!” Claptrap howled, rolling around in all directions frantically. “DON’T CHANGE ME INTO A WEREWOLF! MY CASING CAN’T GROW FUR!”

“ _What._ ”

“OH CRUEL FATE, THAT THE HANDSOME AND NOBLE CLAPTRAP SHOULD FALL TO SUCH A DOOM! THE IRONY, I HAD ALL THE SILVER STRIPPED OUT OF MY COMPONENTS BEFORE I CAME HERE! WHAT A GREEK TRAGEDY!”

Deep inside Remus’s mind, a little timer went ding! and he shook his head. “Okay, you… keep doing what you’re doing,” he said. “I’m leaving now.”

Claptrap’s flailing tirade came to a screeching halt, and he waved at the departing Remus. “HAVE A WONDERFUL EVENING, COURTESY OF THE PORT KRIN TOURISM BOARD!” it yelled before rolling off in the other direction.

~***~

The Mended Drum (est. six weeks ago Tuesday) was a mech bar, and the decor reflected the clientele. People who spent their time with mechs, whether driving them or working on them, liked to be surrounded by things that _weren’t_ mech-related on their time off. For the most part, anyway--there was always some scrap of military memorabilia hung on the walls. The beer was cold, the food edible even if you weren’t drunk and the security unobtrusive. All in all, a fine bar for the discerning mechwarrior or technician.

The moment Remus stepped in the door he was flagged over to a table where two of his drinking buddies were conversing over a pitcher of something dark. “Hey, werewolf!” Rick Ogoonu called out, “come on over and have a seat.”

“That didn’t take long,” Remus said. Ogoonu just smiled at his misfortune, grabbing the pitcher and pouring the beleaguered man a glass.

“Ah, I’m pretty sure they heard _that_ little exchange all the way back in the Expanse,” Ogoonu replied, waving in the general direction of the door. “For such a little bot it’s got a voice that’d cut through a tornado.”

Remus gave the other man an odd look. “I get the feeling that you knew that was going to happen,” he said. Ogoonu shrugged.

“I had a feeling. Claptrap showed up the other day on the latest shipment from home, and nobody’s managed to get rid of him.”

“Which is really weird,” put in Nat Fischer. “You’d think somebody would’ve put the little bastard in a trash compactor well before he hit Krin, but no…”

“Yeah, well, Fen gotta Fen,” Ogoonu shrugged. “I think they’re just happy he’s _here_ and not _there_ anymore. Anyway,” he continued, turning back to Remus, “I _figured_ something might happen, just because _you’re_ too lucky. A name like that and you haven’t pulled a fanboy in months? Something had to give.”

Remus sighed. One moment of weakness in building a cover and now this was his life. “I can’t help that my parents were classicists,” he lied. “If I’d known I’d have stayed home and let my brother Uly come out here.”

Natalie laughed. “Oh sure,” she said. “The big bad mechwarrior--”

“Failed out mechwarrior.”

“Whatever. You’re too curious, Remy. You’d have come out here no matter what.”

“Yeah,” Remus agreed. “I suppose I would have.”

“Besides,” Ogoonu put in, “The side benefits to being Fen-famous haven’t been all _that_ bad, right? I haven’t seen you around all week, man. What you been up to?” He leered. “Wait, no, let me guess, teaching some magic to all the little witches, right?”

“Mind out of the gutter, shorty,” Remus replied. “I’ve been out of town on a job most of the week. Survey craft spotted what looked like an old battlefield a hundred klicks north of here, so they hired a bunch of us to push dirt around while they looked for salvage.”

“Oh yeah?” Ogoonu leaned in eagerly. “Anything good?”

Remus shrugged. “Bits of junk for the most part, but we did find most of a Orion buried a couple meters deep, and get this, it was one from the 25th Amaris Dragoons.”

Natalie whistled. “Damn,” she said. “I didn’t know Antallos was a battleground in the Fall.” Remus shrugged.

“It’s not in the history books, according to the eggheads,” he said. “They’re still trying to figure it out. Might’ve been a deserter from afterwards or something.”

“God damn,” Ogoonu said reverently. “Think about that. Riding your mech all the way through the Fall, running halfway across the galaxy only to end up dying in a hole like this. Hell of a way to go, man.”

“We didn’t find bones, and the ejection seat was missing,” Remus said. “He might’ve punched out. Personally, I kind of hope he did. Like you said, hell of a trip only to die here of all places.”

Natalie raised her glass. “I’ll drink to that.”

~***~

The evening progressed as Saturday nights at the Mended Drum usually did, the inhabitants getting progressively drunker as the booze kept flowing, some light music all the way from Fenspace playing an undertone to the hum of conversation. Remus enjoyed the good dark beer (“Cerean stout, made with real comet water. The owner must have a contact in the supply train to get this stuff all the way out here,” Natalie explained.) and listened to the two mechwarriors complain about work, particularly those nitwits in South Coast and how they were getting salty about Krin’s desalination plant (“oh god, what a horrible pun”) and how XCOM wouldn’t let them go stomp the problem because diplomacy. (“Honestly, we don’t even have to kill anyone, just pancake a couple of their IFVs and boom! Nice and simple like Mom used to solve problems!”)

Then the door opened again and the tone shifted. Remus turned to look and saw something very unexpected in the door. She was tall and athletic, dark hair carefully cropped in a mechwarrior’s cut and wearing a slate gray jumpsuit. She flowed through the crowd with a measured grace that Remus found uncannily--and worryingly--familiar. Ignoring the regulars she stepped up to the bar and started a quiet conversation with the bartender. Remus strained to hear, but couldn’t make out anything intelligble.

Ogoonu’s less-than-gentle nudging brought Remus’s attention back to the table, where his comrades were looking at him with a little surprise. “Forget it man,” Ogoonu said. “She is _so_ far out of your league it ain’t even funny.”

“Who is she?” Remus asked.

“That’s Izzy Jordan. Or _Ser Isobel_ to plebs like us.” Natalie said. “She’s one of the Grey Knights.”

“I don’t think I’ve met any of them,” Remus noted. Ogoonu snorted.

“Of course not, they don’t mix with the common people, even the common mechwarriors,” he said. “Word on the street is they’re some sort of weird religious cult, always talking about ‘our lady’ this and ‘great father’ that. They found Fenspace and it was like they’d breached the pearly gates or something, you know? Surrendered without firing a shot, which I suppose is just as well, they’d have backshot us in a heartbeat if the archangels told ‘em to or whatever.”

“You don’t say,” Remus said absently, suspicions starting to build up in his head.

Natalie nodded. “They’re like, I don’t know, _warrior monks_ or some bullshit like that, not mercs. Very serious even when they’re not in their mechs. Kind of a pain in the ass when we were setting up the Legion, since they had better command authority than us. Always on about proper behavior.”

“Ah, they’re not that bad, Nat,” Ogoonu argued. “Some of ‘em are okay, even if they’re holy rollers. Their CO can put away the brew like nobody I’ve ever seen, for one.” He paused. “Izzy though, I’m pretty sure she was born with a stick up her ass. We trained with her and we’ve seen her in barracks, I don’t think I _ever_ saw her smile once, let alone actually _unwind_.” He scratched his chin thoughtfully. “Wonder what she’s doing down at the Drum.”

“Yeah, wonder what.” Remus finished off his beer and stood up. “Well, I probably ought to get moving, Rick, Nat. Thanks for the beer.”

Ogoonu blinked. “What, seriously? Two pitchers and you’re done? This working for a living thing is bullshit, man.”

Remus shrugged. “Back out to the desert to dig up ancient Rim Worlds wreckage for me in the morning,” he said with a faint grin. “Besides, if I’m destined to strike out with the mighty Ser Isobel, then maybe I ought to try my luck elsewhere. Plenty of other fish in the Talisea.”

Ogoonu chuckled. “That’s what I like about you, man. You always know how to roll with the punches.”

~***~

Remus exited the Mended Drum and let the Port Krin wind scour the genial atmosphere off him, settling into a puzzled frown. The night’s excursion hadn’t been as relaxing as he’d hoped, good Fen beer notwithstanding. These Grey Knights sparked a familiar chord in Remus’s mind--something about possible other Clan activity in the Inner Sphere, Dark Caste or something similar. Ser Isobel’s bearing and poise, combined with Ogoonu’s gossip, suggested that this was more than a handful of criminals and outcasts making their way from the Pentagon.

 _Colonel Wolf needs to know about this,_ Remus thought, and turned back to his apartment. First to write a letter, and then to the Comstar office before he headed back out to the dig.

  
  
  



End file.
